What's the difference between a coder and a programmer? A programmer is a job description. Everyone can be a programmer, whether he ever learned programming or just taught it himself. A programmer gets paid to write code and as long as the code works, nobody cares how "bad" it might be. He may not even like doing his job, he may only do it for the money.A coder loves to code. He may work as a programmer or just code as a hobby. A coder cares for the quality of his code and he enjoys every second of writing it. If he can make money with his code, great, if not, no big deal either.